From Alienated to Communal
In a period of global turmoil, rebuilding local autonomy is an actionable and sensible move, one that hedges on the possibility of breakdown of global systems, and takes advantage of a loosing of norms and rules.
One starting assumption I hold is that there are different flavors of individualism and within an urban American context the current flavor is “alienated”. Alienated individualism offers personal agency within a limited set of institutional paths (e.g. corporations, government, non-profits, academia, etc). Outside these options, there’s isolation. For these entrenched institutions, alienation is a feature not a bug, one that prevents concerted resistance or exit.
The broad adoption of the Internet is changing this. Online, the alienated can find kindred spirits and form community around niche interests, practices, beliefs. I think of this as the emergence of “communal individualism”. My goal is to reflect this online community formation back onto the offline world, and to create a direct tie between the two.
Within urban America, the norm is co-renting. The only difference between co-renting and co-living is intent, being intentional about how and who you live with. Housing is the broadest common denominator — within the current norm everyone needs shelter. Therefore turning shelter into community is a matter of creating intent, and there’s possibility of the proliferation of community, by default, at home.
I believe the essence of home is safety, and safety requires two things: material security and social security. Material security is food, water, sanitation, shelter. Social security is a group that cares for you, and you care for. Therefore the simplest safety system is a group-house. Safety is contingent on autonomy; to be safe, there must be a sufficient degree of self-sufficiency and self-reliance which come from collective power. Autonomy creates independence and integrity; only if there’s self-sufficiency is there freedom to act on one’s own terms, one’s own integrity. Safety allows acceptance; resistance comes from threat, real or perceived, safety creates space for acceptance.
Beyond safety, co-living has other unique properties which make it a powerful entry point into communalism. Living in relation with a group of people creates a unique container for glimpsing oneself through a process of triangulation. In the absence of contrast, defaults are invisible. Self-observation is an object that’s too close to your own field of view to make out clearly. Objectivity assumes a “view from nowhere”, the ability for the subject to observe outside the system of the object. This belief is false, the subject is always part of the system, but some domains have more distortive observer effects than others. The closer the relationship between subject and object the more distorted observation becomes, observing the nature of the subject itself is as close as it comes. Living in relation to others provides a laboratory for contrast. Everything at home is amplified, frictions and impositions are more raw, and contrast is amplified; every difference, disagreement, conflict, trigger provides an opportunity to see some aspect of yourself that would otherwise remain invisible. It provides a laboratory for relational triangulation of self.
Coliving is constrained, there is an inherent scarcity of shared resources of space, time, energy, etc. Counterintuitively this creates an environment which demands a much higher standard of consensus than the alienated norm. It demands n-dimensional alignment. In a disagreement, there is a line between mutually exclusive options. Along this line exists shades of compromise, which entails one or both parties not getting what they need. In the alienated norm, the solution space exists on this line, and every point on the line involves loss. This teaches that needs are illegitimate and should be repressed when living in relation to others. In n-dimensional alignment the solution space is entirely outside this line. More often than not the solution is locating and adjusting upstream joint non-cares. Upstream joint non-cares are factors that the core of the disagreement depend on, which both parties do not care about. In jointly not caring, these factors are points that can be freely adjusted. In being upstream, adjustment can create “slack” within the situation. Like untying a knot, as soon as you create some space, the entire system loosens up, which creates even more opportunities for readjustment. Compromise guarantees loss, which inherently creates fear loop and short-circuited thought. Joint non-cares exist in negative space, which make them invisible from a compromise-oriented mindset. But once seen and appreciated they inherently lower the stakes, common ground is established in the opposite of care, and create an incentive for mutual understanding. Where compromise teaches illegitimacy of needs, alignment teaches their deep legitimacy and the infinite possibility and promise of unexpected solutions.
Coliving is complex, the possibility for cycles, observer effects, emergent dynamics, embedded dependency graphs, and nonlinearities, means you live in a container where the nature of causality is coalescing rather than simple and linear. A world of simple causality is one in which tools of observation are too crude to locate root causes, and proximate causes are scapegoated for lack of better options. In this world, causal emphasis is placed on constituent elements rather than systems and emergent dynamics. This bleeds into notions of personal responsibility and morality; success and failure is scapegoated on individuals rather than complex dynamics. This scapegoating informs a kind of gaslighting, where the sensibility of individual experience and history is invalidated, social systems could care less about that, if you’re in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time you get credit (or blame). A world of coalescing causality requires a more nuanced laboratory to observe emergent dynamics, and it entails a deeper appreciation for complex assemblages rather than constituent elements. I believe only in a world of coalescing causality are root cause analysis and prevention (the holy grail of problem solving) are sensible.
Coliving is serendipitous and non-fungible. The Birthday Problem is a good analogy – a networked world structurally invites serendipity; Life is an unconstrained Birthday Problem. Coliving is a highly connected graph, as such, you live in a serendipity engine, which allows an appreciation and practice of observing, channeling, inviting serendipity. This serendipity provides a rich understanding of the inherent uniqueness and non-fungibility of every unfolding person and dynamic. In contrast, the alienated norm is one predicated on trees not graphs. Trees are an efficient communication and power structure which minimizes edges, ensures unilinear coordination from root to leaves, and creates a divide and conquer dynamic which prevents bottom-up coordination or exit. Trees also create static structures which require prescribed roles and specialization where individuals exist as interchangeable, fungible units, rather than as infinitely unique, endlessly complex beings. Where a graph is a serendipity engine, a tree is a serendipity sink. These properties definitionally destroy serendipity and uniqueness.
Conditionality vis-a-vis transactionality, limitations of introspection vis-a-vis lack of contrast, illegitimacy of needs vis-a-vis compromise, gaslighting of sensibility and scapegoating vis-a-vis simple causality, serendipity minimization and enforced fungibility via trees, are all facets of our existing alienation. They require a new environment for something else to unfold. That is what coliving provides. On the outside it appears utterly innocuous. On the inside, it’s radical co-optation. It unlocks a completely new vision of what the world can be, starting from the world as it is, one step in the past, one step in the future. Imagination is grounded in experience, experience creates the metaphorical space to reason within. Alienated experiences inform an alienated imagination. Coliving provides a new experiential vocabulary to reason within, and with it, the expansion of conceivable futures and worlds to build towards.
Where “alienated individualism” is competitive, zero-sum, prescriptive, “communal individualism” is collaborative, net-positive, and open-ended. Within a nuclear family, spouses either compete as wage earners or differentiate and specialize as “mom” and “dad”, nurturer and provider. There’s insufficient redundancy and slack for individuals to become their most unique selves, to self-actualize. Within “communal individualism” I think there’s a shot for individuals to find the community that needs them and exactly them. If there is a mosaic of differentiated communities, then everyone can find or build the home that they uniquely need, creating a pragmatic path to self-actualization. I dream of a world where our life purpose is our “story of self”, a way of maximizing meaning in our life by becoming our truest and fullest self. In this world, the end goal is stunningly simple: to find home. Find the people we share and align our “story of self” with, and love them with all your being. In this world, my home is my family, it’s my church, it’s my workshop, it’s my dojo, it is my unified world; it is my place in the universe.
What does a society of differentiated grouphouses look like? I think it looks like a complex ecology of group-houses, complete with flows between houses. From 18-30 young people move to cities and “date” houses. Their initial entry point can be a coliving apartment, which is one foot in the renting norm and one foot in coliving. Every house is a cultural container that reveals latent faceted personality. If you want to express and deepen a specific facet of your personality, move into a grouphouse which expresses it. While there’s a broad base of generic social houses and coliving apartments, there are differentiated house “scenes” which offer specific practices, norms, rites, ritual, routine. As people age and know what they want, they form more narrow cultures, and interface with “scenes” to filter entrants. The “mom and pop shop” of this future is cottage industry, a group of friends producing software, music, content, together, at home. After “dating” a variety of houses, you have a sense of what world-home you want to build and who else would want to be a part of it. From 30-50, you take your group and buy a home in the suburbs or remote area. You have a family for 20 years and share a collective mortgage to build wealth together. Ties with former houses are maintained, as this creates a pipeline for future people to join both transiently and permanently; for retreats, for gaps between jobs and for vacations, for young couples to test if the rural or family life is right for them. More families move out to join yours. One beautiful byproduct of this mobility pattern is that the blue-island-red-sea political divide is disrupted as city-folks (especially those with remote-friendly work) move to affordable rural areas to establish their world-homes.
The literal root of “economics” is home; a beautiful property of home is that it’s the most local and universal, and therefore simultaneously the most global. If you reform home, you reform the world, bottom up. And there’s no downside, the worst case scenario is that you end up with a better home. Bounded downside, unbounded upside. Hyper-local with the potential of hyber-global. This is the path to global change, and change starts at home.
If this is the end goal, what is the path? How to build autonomy? How to enable differentiation of home?
The Path to Autonomy
From an actuarial standpoint “cutting costs” is synonymous with building autonomy.
When a company increases revenue it is inherently extractive, not necessary in a bad way, but energy is leaving one system and entering another. Conversely, cost reduction means decreasing the flow of resources leaving the system. Cost reduction comes from two sources: self-reliance, and recognition and reduction of false needs.
Cutting costs is in-housing our needs, sourcing solutions from within the system. It is building self-reliance.
Cutting costs is recognition and reduction of false needs. This starts with awareness, seeking understanding of our own motives, and learning the difference between perceived and true needs. This is non-trivial, it is an object that is so close to your face that it is difficult to take into focus. There is a deep and tragic irony of consumerism. Why do we need a car? Is it functional, a need for transportation? Or is it something else? Is it status, a sense of self-image, the belief that I am the kind of person that should look a certain part? And why does this self-image matter?
Status matters because it comes with the promise of social safety. High status is worthy of love, it is worthy of help, I deserve safety. There is a simple reason that the drive for status is insatiable: it is a false promise. Safety based on transactionality is not safety, because transactionality shows the precise limits of care. Safety is something deeper. Safety is knowing you are fundamentally enough, rather than having enough.
From this perspective, the billionaire class represents wealth without safety. They are parched on a desert island, trying to quench their thirst with oil rather than water. They need water like the rest of us, they need home, but keep chugging oil. The root of consumerism is insatiable wants from endlessly frustrated needs.
If autonomy is the means, safety is the end, and safety comes from community. It comes from paying forward care by catching others, and learning safety by being caught yourself.
When you have found your place in the universe, you have found deep existential and pragmatic safety. You have defeated insatiable wants by achieving root needs.
The Path to Differentiation
Throughout history there are unique periods of “divergent competition”. In these periods, autonomous social units of comparable size exist in a stably unstable arrangement where consolidation is difficult. While this unstable arrangement persists there is a shifting competitive-collaborative dynamic between units, one that drives divergence and differentiation rather than convergence and homogenization.
Examples of this include the Greek city states in Antiquity, Italian city states in the Renaissance, the European nation states, the American colonies. During periods of “divergent competition” prolonged work occurs, as each actor is forced to run a marathon or be consumed by a neighbor. These periods typically end in consolidation: top-down consolidation through conquest (e.g. Greek, Italian city states), bottom-up federation (e.g. American colonies forming a federation), or a combination (e.g. European nation states occupied and then formed an American-backed federation).
What would divergent competition within coliving look like?
I believe it starts with a recurring Fair.
Ritual is the heartbeat of a community. Every beat is a recentering on shared practices, beliefs, history. Every beat is a re-instantiation of practice with its own unique spirit, with new experiments, and over time a deepening occurs where every beat becomes embedded with more functional and narrative meaning.
At the Fair, houses meet, they form relationships with each other. Dunbar’s number moves up a level, to the level of community rather than individuals. Coliving is inherently transient among individuals, house culture is more persistent than residents. Relationships will be between houses primarily, and individuals secondarily.
As houses are put in contact, they’re nudged to differentiate. They don’t want to be a generic social house. They do something special, something different. Repetitive comparison is sufficient to drive differentiation.
My current target is a House Fair every 3 months. The Fair is a container for the community for whatever it wants; announcements, asks and offers, performances, polls, etc. Every beat I want to run a new class of experiment. If the experiment works, it will be rerun by default at the next Fair.
At the start, the Fair will be focused on building coliving into a distinct constituency. Once there’s sufficient internal cohesion and identity within the community, then it will be opened to the co-living curious. At this point, the name of the game is flow. Flow between, flow in. By this time the emphasis of the Fair will shift to synchronization of coordination. In university, the semester system creates a natural opportunity for “music chairs” where everyone can swap spots. If there’s a Fair every 3 months like clockwork and its common knowledge, then you can orchestrate movement between houses by calculating move cycles. And every 3 months there’s an opportunity to seed new houses. Microloans can be offered from the community if security deposits are a problem, as well as mentorship from serial grouphouse founders. For whatever exists offline, there should be an equivalent service that exists online, starting with easier ways of finding housing within existing grouphouses (work in progress).
The Fair will be the one door to open them all, the one door that coliving curious can enter to move closer to home. As such, it will be an engine that takes alienated individuals and puts them on a path to communal individualism. As more people enter the system, house niches* become sustainable, enabling further differentiation. And as a broader variety of niches exist, more people will “fit” within the new norm. Benevolent cycle. (*Fun fact: the root of “niche” is “to make a nest”).
For this cycle to begin there must be a continuous, safe route from one norm to the next. While the Fair will help with cohesion within the broader coliving community, there are two other gaps. The first is a direct online access point into community – ie a Directory. The second is a more graceful transition into coliving than directly moving into a house. This is where Fractal in NYC has innovated (Fractal SF 1-Pager) – by networking an apartment complex people can fluidly transition into coliving.
If the Fair, Directory and Complex were roughly aligned and jointly coordinated it would get the best self-reinforcing results to maximize flow into coliving, and maximize formation of niche / scene houses.
As you build more density and trust you can run more and more ambitious experiments, along the lines of a federated network state.
Local currencies? Collective mortgages? Banking? Community shares? Microgrids? Mesh networks? Federated networking? Federated programmatic law? You can reconstitute society, I want to be there for it, want to experience and learn it all, and I have a path there.
Building the Home Stack
Over the last decade I’ve been collecting communities with resonant emphasis on autonomy: Coliving, which emphasizes DIY, sharing, in-housing needs, minimizing waste, building community, addressing inherent scarcity of the nuclear family norm. DWeb, which emphasizes autonomy of networking, communication, data, content creation and hosting.
Programmable Cryptography within the Ethereum community, which emphasizes the inherent autonomy and portability of cryptography, and a future where cryptography can be used as a kind of language in and of itself, a language that opens whole new domains of communication and bottom-up epistemology.
Strong Towns, which emphasizes the social and financial bankruptcy of suburbs and the need for bottom-up revitalization using new forms. Sleepawake, a meta religion cult which emphasizes seeing reality as it is, by using any and all modalities that work.
Somatics community, which emphasizes the body as the source of truth.
Inner / Outer Mountain monastery, which emphasizes alignment of inner work with outer service.
Edge City, which emphasizes building new societies in pop-up city form. Summer of Protocols, which emphasizes that protocols are win-win games that can arise among autonomous actors.
My path is simple. I will make contact with each community. I will become a member and ally and grow to understand its tools, practices, values. I will become a community organizer in the most useful and resonant communities. And then over time I will test convergence, see if these groups are as resonant as I feel they are. If they are resonant, I will slowly and gradually support convergence, and I’ll start a ~15-20 person grouphouse in SF which is a unity of these communities.
The goal of this house will be to build a new home stack, centered on home servers. During the Protestant Reformation, literacy and printing created the ability to cut out the priestly middlemen who had captured Catholicism. It meant direct access to knowledge and truth. This created the capacity to experiment, and Protestantism became a blanket term for the hundreds of denominations seeking their own path to Truth, rather than one universal religion (fun fact: “Catholic” literally means “universal”). I believe the home server will be the Gutenberg bible of the 21st century. The home server will be the single point of orchestration to “codify” ritual, routine, rules, rites, hygienes, self-surveillance, and consensus mechanisms within the community. It will also be a single point of orchestration for the outside community, we will eventually host our own forum, blog, mirrors for software, archiving and content, etc. It would also be a natural site for distributed ledgers that could form the foundation for digital currencies and programmatic law; the same promise as Ethereum but organic and supple from the bottom-up rather than prescribed and rigid from the top-down.
The home server will be the nucleus of participatory democracy, morality, meaning-making. Legibility, enforceability, templatization beget rapid diffusion and experimentation between houses. Control of networking and content-hosting begets new autonomous coordination mechanisms, incentive / financial systems around coordination and content sharing, paths to federation.
The best path I have found to home servers is programmable cryptography, as it provides useful local-first applications starting with phones. Ideally traction of http://cons pirio.space/ will align with house formation, so that there’s a real need for home servers by the time it’s on track. The premise of Conspirio is that cryptography allows for new communication primitives that are de-alienated by design; if alienation arises from Prisoner Dilemma situations, de-alienation allows safe and expressive communication and collaboration in the face of defection. Communication feels like the most universal practical and metaphorical space for human interaction, and defeating alienation there first feels like a proper entry point into “communal individualism”.
This will be the proto-home, the first home with a new communication / content / social / economic stack. Our first users will be our own home. Our first clients will be our neighbors. And then we’re off to the races.
Success or failure, my end goal is the same: a happy home. A group of people I love and who love me, who want to embark on the adventure of family together. And honoring this mission ensures everything else has the right values, that it’s being designed for the right purpose. Today, I am an alien. I hope with all my heart that on this journey I may become a human.